Equivocality

I could go anywhere, anywhere at all, but I don’t want to.

I have discovered that I am a tourist. I am a market. My guidebook promised me exotic lands and I ignored the inherent contradiction of thousands of backpackers tramping through untouched lands. And I hated the camel trek. Actually, the camels were cool, but no one actually rides them anymore. The locals have cars now. I would have got just as much exploration done had I stayed home and gone to an amusement park.

Screw it. I’m going off the map. There may not be anything there, but I’m going anyway. I’m going to claw my way into a situation that wasn’t sold to me.

28 degrees North, 12 degrees West. A point of no importance in the middle of nowhere. That’s my destination.

I find that I am at a loss to describe my experiences in Africa. This continent is, really, a whole other world. Africa is one of those complicated things that cannot be understood in a simple way.

This is the second Murakami book I’ve read. I found this book intriguing, certainly, and it kept my attention, but it was also a little empty for me somehow, not quite as substantive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Imaginative, but a little too predictable I guess. In particular, the way his characters think or say very deep things in sometimes very trite words annoys me. To take a concrete example, see first few pages of book. “A dark, omnipresent pool of water,” he writes. Or see the climatic moment when Kafka forgives his mother. “Mother, you say, I forgive you. And with those words, audibly, the frozen part of your heart dissolves.” Of course, both of these lines were actually spoken by a character called The Boy Named Crow, who is “a theorizing crow,” who perhaps has license to say such melodramatic things.

Yet this spirit overlaps with something I do like about the book, the central dreaminess of it, best summed up when someone quotes Goethe: “Everything’s a metaphor.”